this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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TBH this is a huge factor.
I don’t use ChatGPT much less use it like it’s a person, but I'm socially isolated at the moment. So I bounce dark internal thoughts off of locally run LLMs.
It’s kinda like looking into a mirror. As long as I know I'm talking to a tool, it’s helpful, sometimes insightful. It’s private. And I sure as shit can’t afford to pay a therapist out of the gazoo for that.
It was one of my previous problems with therapy: payment depending on someone else, at preset times (not when I need it). Many sessions feels like they end when I’m barely scratching the surface. Yes therapy is great in general and for deeper feedback/guidance, but still.
To be clear, I don’t think this is a good solution in general. Tinkering with LLMs is part of my living, I understand the jist of how they work, I tend to use raw completion syntax or even base pretrains.
But most people anthropomorphize them because that’s how chat apps are presented. That’s problematic.
ChatGPT (last time I tried it) is extremely sycophantic though. Its high default sampling also leads to totally unexpected/random turns.
Google Gemini is now too.
And they log and use your dark thoughts.
I find that less sycophantic LLMs are way more helpful. Hence I bounce between Nemotron 49B and a few 24B-32B finetunes (or task vectors for Gemma) and find them way more helpful.
…I guess what I’m saying is people should turn towards more specialized and “openly thinking” free tools, not something generic, corporate, and purposely overpleasing like ChatGPT or most default instruct tunes.